University Place

How Wisconsin Became the Cheese State

Chris Viau: Good evening. On behalf of the Winnebago Extension team, I would like to welcome you to Wisconsin Idea Week. My name is Chris Viau, and I lead this amazing team of outreach educators and support professionals who are embodying the Wisconsin Idea right here in Winnebago County. The University of Madison was built upon the foundation of the Wisconsin Idea, that education and research should be able to reach people and communities beyond the campus, and only the borders of Wisconsin would be the limit.

Through UW-Madison Extension, our outreach creates key connection points for families, communities, businesses, nonprofit organizations, local government, and many, many more, based upon the Wisconsin Idea. We support local volunteers, community organizations, leaders young and old, to take action and serve as role models in their communities and make sure that Wisconsinites have the latest research, best practices, and educational opportunities. To continue highlighting our university connections, we partnered with UW-Madison’s Badger Talks, the speaker’s bureau for the campus.

It’s a free resource to residents, communities, organizations that can tap in to over 500 faculty and staff that are available to travel around the state and bring their knowledge and information to your community. We encourage you to visit BadgerTalks.wisc.edu for more information. Tonight, I am incredibly pleased to introduce Dean Sommer. Dean will guide us through a history of Wisconsin as the cheese state, not just visually and not just audibly, but also with touch, taste, and smell. Dean is a cheese technologist with the Center for Dairy Research at UW-Madison, working over the past 19 years, serving as a technical resource to Wisconsin cheese manufacturers and their customers.

Prior to that, Dean spent 14 years with Alto Dairy in Waupun, which at the time was the largest cheese plant in the state. Dean obtained his Master of Science degree in food science from UW-Madison. And it’s my pleasure to welcome Dean Sommer.

[applause]

Dean Sommer: Thanks, Chris, and good evening, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. And hopefully I can give you some insights into how Wisconsin ended up being the cheese state. So, we know ourselves, of course, as America’s Dairyland. It’s on our license plates. You know, we wear cheese hats proudly. We produce an awful lot of good cheese here. And we’re proud of our dairy farmers here as well. I wanted to just give you a little bit more history of myself. So, I actually, I am a Winnebago County boy. I was raised in my early years on a farm, just a little bit northwest of Winchester, south of Dale, and east of Readfield. So, if you know where that is, up in the northern part of Winnebago County.

And then later, we ultimately moved to Neenah, and I’m a Neenah Rocket, from a high school experience. Then I went to UW-Stevens Point, earned a degree in biology and chemistry. And then, as Chris said, a Masters of Science at UW-Madison in food science. After that, I worked for five years on campus in the Dairy Science department. Now, Dairy Science at the university is the cow end of the business, okay? Milk production, the cow end. I worked for this gentleman, Dr. Bud Schultz. He was a titan in that industry. Great guy. And then, as Chris mentioned, I moved on to Alto Dairy, which at the time was not just the largest cheese plant in Wisconsin. It was the largest cheese plant in the United States.

And we produced about 250,000 pounds of cheese a day, seven days a week, about 363 days a year. So, it was, that’s when I started. It got bigger after I was there a while. So, I worked there quite a number of years, and then I went to Madison. We moved to Madison area, and now I work at the Center for Dairy Research as a cheese technologist. So, here’s our question. So, in the U.S. dairy industry, why Wisconsin? How did Wisconsin become the center of the dairy universe in the United States? Well, it didn’t start out that way. Okay? The original, in terms of the ag historical beginnings, the original settlers in Wisconsin were Yankee farmers.

Yankees were, that was a term for people from essentially New England, the northeast part of the United States. And they didn’t raise cows and milk cows for milk. They raised wheat. They were wheat farmers. But that cycle ran out when, in the 1860s, the wheat crop was devastated by insect called chinch bug, which I’ll talk a little bit more, talk a little bit more about in a minute. But luckily for Wisconsin, our soil and our topography and our climate and our rainfall were really ideally adapted for dairy farming. But even that didn’t happen by accident, which I’ll get to in a minute. So, let’s back up again to those early years of agriculture in Wisconsin, 1840 to 1880.

It was the Yankee farmers, and they raised wheat. So, wheat was a valuable cash crop. And back then, believe it or not, Wisconsin was known as the breadbasket of the United States. Okay, so, why wheat? Well, it was an important cash crop, and it didn’t take a whole lot of capital investment in equipment and in buildings and things like that. Pretty easy to grow. You sow it, and then you hope for good rain and good weather, and then ultimately, you harvest it. Good financial return. Pretty cheap to farm that way. And wheat for flour, obviously, was a really important foodstuff that was in high demand. So, it made a lot of sense.

So, here’s some pictures here in the upper left, which I’ll get to in a minute. We lived in Green Lake for about 25 years. That’s the mill pond. And there’s a little dam there. And that dam was built to harness water power originally for lumber milling, but then for flour milling. And if you go in the lower left part of that slide, that’s a flour mill in Green Lake. And there were two of them. Green Lake is tiny; it’s 1,100 people. And they had two flour mills back in the day run by water power provided by that little dam. Okay, so that’s how important that was. But like I mentioned earlier, then the wheat industry declined. The biggest thing was the chinch bug.

See that little bug in the lower left there? It just ate all the wheat kernels and destroyed the crop. But another thing happened as well, and that was depletion of the soil ’cause they didn’t know about fertilizer. So, if you grow wheat year after year after year and don’t fertilize the soil, what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna deplete the soil of nutrients and you’re not gonna get a good crop. So, kind of both those things happened at the same time. Well, luckily around that same time, we started to see a large immigration of Europeans to Wisconsin.

Swiss people, German people, Norwegian people Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, Dutch, and they brought traditions and skills, both dairy farming and cheese and butter production. And so, they brought those things from their homeland. And if you look in this picture on the lower right there, that’s a Swiss copper kettle. So, that gentleman there is making Swiss cheese, which is actually is a quite difficult cheese to make well. So, you might be wondering what this bell is here.

[bell rings]

Dean Sommer: So, you know what this is, right? That’s a cow bell. So, my great-great-grandfather, Johann Suter, on my mother’s side, brought this with him from the Alpine region of Switzerland, by Grindelwald and Interlaken, when he moved to Wisconsin in the 1890s and started dairy farming. So, this goes back in my family, dairy farming on my mother’s side to the 1890s. My father’s side of the family were also dairy farmers. So, the dairy heritage is somehow in my blood, I think. But, so, I keep this proudly hanging in my living room because it– and if you look, you can look later on here, around here are little bears. Well, they’re from Bern area. Bern is the bear region.

So, that’s why the little bears are around there. So… So, what did these new European settlers do? They built barns for their livestock. They knew about animal care, not just growing wheat. And they knew the importance of fertilizer in the form of manure. Now, if you would go to the farm where I grew up in my younger years, the barn in the lower right picture, that’s not our farm, but the barn looked exactly like that, with that metal roof. And we had a silo just like the one on the left side of the barn there. Looked just like that. But you know what? If you look at this picture on the lower left, we had another barn that looked just like that.

And as a kid growing up, I kind of wondered, now wait a minute. The one on the left, we called that the old barn, and the one on the right we called the new barn, which was built in 1907. [audience laughs] But the old barn is, that, you know, there is no place for animals. You know, here on the one on the right, the white part down there, that’s where the animals are. And the haymow was up above, right? Just like all the old red barns. But there’s no lower part here for animals. Well, what that barn is, that’s a wheat barn. And that’s where they thresh the wheat in the center section. And they stored the straw in the mow part on either side of the center aisle. So, the center aisle is right there.

And then there was a mow on the left and the right. And that’s where they stored the straw. And if you want to see one that looks just like that, and this picture might be from there, Old World Wisconsin in Eagle, Wisconsin, has a barn just like that. So, the growth in dairy cow numbers. So, if you go back to right after the Civil War in 1867, there were only 245,000 dairy cattle in Wisconsin. By 1912, it was 1,460,000. 1945, 2.5 million cows. But the average output per cow per lactation– So, what’s a lactation? Typically, you milk a cow for 10 months, 305 days, and then you don’t milk it for two months, 60 days, to let it rest before it has a calf, and then you start milking again.

So, in one lactation, so, a ten-month time period, an average cow in 1945 gave us 6,330 pounds of milk. By 2018, there was only 1,280,000 cows, so a lot less than 1945. But each cow averaged 24,000 pounds of milk per lactation. And the latest numbers that we have in 2024 were down to a 1,269,000 cows, but the production is 25,493 pounds of milk per cow per lactation. So, we’re getting a lot more milk from our cows today than we did in my grandparents’ time, back in the ’40s and ’50s. So, who is the gentleman that really drove this idea of converting from wheat to milk to dairy? And that’s this gentleman, William Dempster Hoard. And I think, and he’s widely known as the father of Wisconsin dairying.

He came from New York. He migrated to Wisconsin just before the Civil War, and he lived in Fort Atkinson. And his favorite cows were also my favorite cows, which are rarely seen today, and that’s the Guernsey cattle. Okay? So, he saw that wheat was declining, and he knew we had to do something different for Wisconsin agriculture because wheat was going away. And he had learned some lessons in New York State that kind of pointed him in the right direction. And he had this vision for Wisconsin to be a prosperous milk-producing state. And his motto was “Substitute the cow for the plow.” Okay? So, I want to back up just a minute. So, one thing he did later was he started this magazine.

Those of you that are dairy farmers may well be familiar with it. It’s called <i>Hoard’s Dairyman,</i> and it’s still in print, being printed yet today. And the farm that he started is still in existence today. And he’s still, they still have Guernsey cows on that farm yet today, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later as well. So, this question comes up all the time. Who started the first cheese plant in Wisconsin? It depends how you define a cheese factory. But a lot of people would say Anne Pickett. And Anne Pickett in 1841 started making cheese in a little factory near Watertown, Wisconsin.

And she brought in milk not just from her own cows, but from some neighbor cows, neighbors’ cows as well. So, in essence, that was a small beginning factory. Other people might argue and say Chester Hazen was the first. Now, we came up here from Madison, my wife Andrea and I, today, up through Rosendale. And just south of Rosendale is the little crossroads town of Ladoga. And if you get to Ladoga and turn west on that road and go down about a quarter mile, maybe a third of a mile on the north side of the road, there’s a big rock with a plaque on it and it said, “Here Chester Hazen started the first cheese factory in Wisconsin.” And that was in 1864, towards the end of the Civil War.

It was built away from the farmstead. He started with 100 cows. A year later, 200, milk from 200 cows. Six years later, milk from a thousand cows. And he even started shipping some of his cheese outside the borders of Wisconsin. Okay. We talk about certain varieties of cheeses as being Wisconsin originals, meaning they were invented here. And one of those originals is brick cheese, okay? And that was invented in Wisconsin in 1877, again near Watertown by John Jossi. So, why do they call it brick cheese? There’s two reasons. One is brick cheese is made in a form, and we call these hoops in the industry. These, it was made in a perforated hoop like this, which is kind of shaped like a brick.

So, that’s part of it. But the other part of it is they would literally press the cheese in the form with a real brick. And they still do that yet today, okay? If you go to Widmer Cheese Factory down in Theresa, he’s still using his grandfather’s bricks from the early 1900s to press his brick cheese in these forms. Okay? Now, brick cheese has another name. It’s called Married Man’s Limburger. What’s that all about? Well, Limburger is a little bit aromatic, right? So, your breath might not be the nicest after you eat a bunch of Limburger.

So, it was said that when a young man married, he was supposed to switch from Limburger to brick cheese ’cause brick cheese had a little bit of the Limburger taste, but it wasn’t nearly as stinky, and his wife could stand his breath. So, it was called Married Man’s Limburger. But I wanted to tell you that there’s actually today three types of Limburger in the market. If it has this silver foil on like this, that’s the strongest stuff. So, that’s Limburger light. It’s kind of towards, it’s pretty stinky. If you see one that looks like this, that’s just a little bit stinky. It’s pretty mild, but it has a little, just a tiny bit of that Limburger taste. And then you have some that look like this.

And that’s called sweet brick. And that has no Limburger taste at all. So, there’s actually three different styles of brick cheese on the market. Another Wisconsin original is Colby cheese. This was invented in 1885 in the town of Colby, Wisconsin, which is up in the northwest part of the state by Joseph Steinwand. And it’s similar to cheddar, except they wash the curd with water, which makes it the cheese a little bit less acidic and a little bit higher moisture. And it also leaves a lot of little tiny little holes in the cheese, not eyes, but just little irregular holes, which is the way Colby should be.

Now, if you look at these guys here, they’re packing hoops– remember, that’s the form– with curd. Well, here is one of those hoops, okay? Just like the ones in those pictures. So, these hoops are called longhorn hoops, okay? Longhorn, whether it’s Colby or cheddar, those are the two varieties you can get in longhorns. Longhorn only talks about the shape. The cylindrical shape, okay? So, that’s a longhorn. If you go to some grocery stores, not many, you can find cheese that looks like this. That came, that was cut out of a longhorn, okay? Occasionally you’ll see that. More frequently… …you’ll see half of one of these, which looks like this, right? So, that’s a longhorn, okay?

So, that talks about the shape of the cheese. CoJack was also invented in Wisconsin in 1979, in a little factory about a half hour drive west of Madison in the little town of Arena. So, there’s a story behind that. So, again, CoJack traditionally was made in that longhorn format. And CoJack, of course, is a mixture of Monterey Jack and Colby cheese. So, how did it originate? Well, that factory made Long Johns of Colby, which is orange, always orange, and Monterey Jack, which is always white, okay? But at the end of the day, they typically have a little pile of white curd left over, but not enough to fill one of those hoops.

And they’d have a little pile of orange Colby curd, but not enough to fill a hoop. But if they combined them– one day, they got a bright idea– they could fill one more hoop and get a piece of cheese that looked like this. Okay. What are we gonna do with it? Well, in a lot of little towns, even yet today, there’s a cheese factory, there’s a church, and there’s a bar. Well, there was a bar right next door. So, originally, and they knew the bar owner, they gave that cheese to the bar owner and said, just– for free, “Just carve it up and serve it to your customers.

“And it’s salty, and it’ll make them drink more beer, and everybody will be happy.” And the customers loved it so much they demanded to be able to buy it. So, even for that little factory, it grew into a business very quickly of millions of pounds of Colby– CoJack cheese a year. Now, the other interesting thing is the name, CoJack. So, there’s two theories on that. And the obvious one is Colby, Monterey Jack: CoJack, right? But again, the year was 1979, and a very recent popular TV show was Telly Savalas in <i>Kojak.</i> It was spelled with a “K,” not a “C.” So, there’s some people that think that that TV show, “Kojak,” kind of put the idea in their head to call it CoJack, too.

So, that well could be. Okay, I’m gonna switch gears a little bit now and talk about how UW-Madison played such an important role in developing the dairy industry in Wisconsin from its very earliest days. So, what you’re seeing here is that’s Ag Hall, and that’s Lake Mendota. That’s Picnic Point back there. That’s University Bay there. So, that’s perspective. So, Chris talked about the Wisconsin Idea. That was coined by former UW President Charles Van Hise. That’s a picture of him there. And he coined that in 1904, the philosophy that the universities in the state should serve the people of the state and improve the quality of life for all those living within the state.

And the boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of the state, and we still believe in that and live that every day where I work now. So, Wisconsin ultimately became known as the dairy state, but who preceded us at the dairy state– as the dairy state? And the answer is New York, okay? Because, and New York is still a pretty big dairy state, both New York and Vermont out east, okay? So, Wisconsin wanted to become much stronger in dairying. So, where do you think we stole some really knowledgeable dairy people from? New York, right? Cornell University in New York. W.D. Hoard, who I talked about already, came from New York.

Hiram Smith came from– Hiram Smith came from New York, and he ultimately became the first president of the Wisconsin Dairymen’s Association, later a UW regent, and he was instrumental in organizing the Wisconsin State Experimental Stations at their start. W.A. Henry came from New York. He was our first professor of agriculture and later our first dean of the UW College of Agriculture. Stephen Babcock, I’m gonna talk about him in a minute. He was the first agricultural chemist hired at the UW. And Walter Price came to UW in 1929 from Cornell in New York, and became the leading cheese expert in the United States from 1929 well into the 1960s. He lived to be 100 years old. Okay, some milestones.

So, again, W.A. Henry came from Cornell in 1880. The first professor of agriculture. 1883, the UW Experimental Farm opened. 1889, the UW College of Agriculture was formed, okay? 1885, the beginning of the Farmer Institutes and Cooperative Extension. Also the first farm short course was held. What is that? Teaching people how to– about animal husbandry for dairy cows. 1888 is when Stephen Babcock came from Cornell as the first professor of agricultural chemistry. And in 1890, the Babcock milk fat test was developed by Stephen Babcock. And if you look at this picture here on the right, that’s Stephen Babcock in later years demonstrating his famous Babcock test.

And I’m gonna talk about that more in a minute. Here, if you look at all these little bottles down at the bottom, those are all Babcock bottles. And I have some of them, I have three of them here. These are Babcock bottles. This was the first one. This is for milk. So this was the first practical, relatively inexpensive, relatively rapid fat test for milk. Prior to that, how did they pay for milk from the farm? Solely by weight, okay? But we know today– they probably knew then, too– that different cows, different breeds, different feeds gave higher fat content than others. The more fat that’s in the milk, the more cheese you can make from the milk.

The more fat that’s in the milk, the more butter you can make from the milk. So, one farm, Farm A, that has a high butter fat test, let’s say it’s 4.8% butter fat in the milk, and Farm B might have 3.2% butter fat, well, Farm A’s milk is gonna make a lot more cheese or a lot more butter. So, it’s actually worth a lot more money. But before Babcock invented this, this seemingly simple bottle and fat test, there was no way to tell the difference in fat content between milk from different farms. That revolutionized the dairy industry, okay? ‘Cause now we could pay for milk equitably, based on what it was worth in terms of how much cheese or how much butter that milk would make. Okay? So, Dr.

Babcock invented this test in 1890. And it totally changed the value determination of milk, and it was a pivotal moment in the dairy industry. And Dr. Babcock did a lot of other great things, too. And he was widely known around the world as the Thomas Edison of the dairy industry. So, now that we could tell what the fat content of milk was, we could, not only could we pay farmers more equitably, but now farmers, they could tell, well, do Jerseys give more fat, or do Guernseys, or do Holsteins? Or if I change my feed, does the fat test go up? Does the fat test go down? What bulls should I use to sire calves? ‘Cause some bulls we’ll sire calves with turn out to be cows with higher milk fat than others.

So, it revolutionized all kinds of things in the industry from nutrition, reproduction, genetics, payment systems, everything. It was just a huge turning point in the dairy industry worldwide. Okay, early years. Remember I mentioned Hiram Smith earlier? That building on the left is Hiram Smith Hall. It’s where the original dairy, both on the farm side and in the dairy product side, their departments were housed. That building is still standing on campus. It’s only a block away from where I work, okay? And in the early years, in the 1880s and very early 1900s, every year there was a resident two-week training course in dairy manufacturing. This was not for kids going for their undergraduate degree.

This was for kids out in the farms and in the cheese and butter plants around the state to come and learn the best practices for making cheese and making butter. And if you look at the picture on the right, there are students, I believe they’re working with cream separators there, learning how to separate cream from milk. And in the lower right-hand picture, that’s students in lecture in a classroom. Notice what they’re wearing. They’re wearing uniforms that look just like that because that uniform is one of their uniforms.

A number of years ago, I got a cold call, and it was a lady from Oshkosh, and she said, “I have my grandfather’s uniform “when he was in this dairy school in Madison in the early 1900s.” Would I like it? And I’m like, “Yes, I would like it!” So, she even brought it down and dropped it off. So, I show that off proudly. And you probably can’t see it from where you’re sitting, but if you look at the collar, embroidered in red, it says the University of Wisconsin. So, that was the uniform that they were issued in those early years. Now, if you look at what’s on the easel, those photos of people, that’s happens to be the graduating class from this, from this course in the year 1909, okay?

And I believe there’s a picture of Hiram Smith Hall in the middle of that. And in the center ring of pictures are the instructors. And underneath their picture, it says what they instructed in. Creamery, which is butter, cheese, machinery, boilers, laboratory, things like that. And then all the other pictures around there are the graduating students from that. So, you can see in 1909 how many people came to those courses during the winter. Why in the winter? Because back in those days, farmers would drive their cows off in the winter ’cause you gotta rest them for two months and there’s no pasture, so they drive ’em off then.

It was the ideal time to take two weeks of time to go to Madison and learn how to make cheese and butter. If you go to Baker Cheese near St. Cloud, Plymouth, they have one of those pictures in their office because the original Baker went there. If you go to Grassland Butter, up by Greenwood, there they have a picture ’cause their grandfather went to this class. There’s an– if you go to Henning’s cheese near Kiel, there’s a picture in their little museum with their grandfather who learned to make cheese in that class. So, many of the existing cheese and butter plants in Wisconsin started with their forbearers going to these classes. Timeline, 1910.

Way back then, Wisconsin became the leader in cheese production. Okay? They started to be able to ship cheese to New York on ice-cooled rail cars. 1915, Wisconsin started to lead the nation in milk production. 1916 through the present, Wisconsin cheesemakers were required to have a license to make cheese, and even today it’s required for a licensed cheesemaker to be physically on site at all times when cheese is being made, okay? So, I often am asked how many licensed cheesemakers are there in Wisconsin? About 1,250. Okay? Then 1921, Wisconsin had instituted mandatory grading. That means sensory evaluation, taste, feel, touch, of the major cheese varieties.

Cheddar was the big one, but also Colby, Monterey Jack, brick, Munster, and Swiss, okay? And what you see that gentleman on the right doing is taking an edible ink stamp. He has tasted that cheese. He has felt that cheese. He’s a licensed grader, and he’s putting an ink stamp on the surface of that wheel of cheese to say, “I, a licensed grader, have looked at it and declared it to be first-rate cheese.” So, if you look at this next picture, a wheel of cheddar cheese, that emblem is still in existence today. It says, “Wisconsin State brand,” which means it’s first class, best cheese. And there’s a three-digit number at the bottom of the word brand, 067.

That’s the grader’s license number that declared that cheese to be first-rate cheese, okay? And still today, Wisconsin is the only state that requires and has licensed cheesemakers, and that requires and has licensed cheese graders. Okay? So, another timeline. The peak number of cheese factories occurred in 1922. At that time, there were 2,800 and a few more cheese factories in Wisconsin. This particular picture is called Buckhorn Cheese, and that’s down right around Beaver Dam. Okay? Now, here’s a graph of showing cheese plants and cheese production. This line shows the number of cheese plants. And here it peaked in 1922 at 2,807. And then it fell off rapidly. But notice this line down here.

This is, so, this is number of plants, cheese factories. This is total pounds of cheese production. That continued to climb. What does that tell you? That tells you the factories became bigger. So, what accounted for that drop-off in the number of factories while simultaneously increasing the amount of cheese that was made, meaning bigger factories? Two major events. One is before 1922, an awful lot of milk still had to be hauled from the farm to the cheese plant by horse and cart. And you can’t go very far by horse and cart. That’s why cheese plants were at every major crossroads. But now, all of a sudden, you had trucks and cars. Now you could go further.

Also, starting about that time, some cheese plants started to have electricity, so there was less manual labor. They could have pumps and automatic machines that stirred the curd and things like that. So, the factories could become more automated. They could become bigger and produce more cheese per day. So, that’s why that graph looks the way it does. Now, this line shows the number of dairy farms and milk production. So, let’s look at dairy farms first. In 1930, these are in thousands. So, there was 167,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin in 1930, okay? Today, 5,500. But they’re a lot bigger, okay? Milk production, okay, went from 11.2 billion to 32.4 billion pounds. So, milk production climbed.

But the number of dairy farms has gone down dramatically. What does that tell you? The farms are a lot bigger today. When I was a little kid on the farm, we milked 12 cows. That’s unheard of today. But now they’re milking 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000. So, trend, milk production per cow. Let’s look at that first. Back in 1930, 5,680 pounds per lactation per cow. Today, 25,493 pounds per 10-month lactation, okay? Number of cows in 1930, 1,973,000. Today, 1,269,000, okay? So, that didn’t fall off nearly as dramatically. Technology and improvements. 1972, Wisconsin first topped a billion pounds of cheese made per year. Twenty years later, we surpassed 2 billion pounds. By 2022, we surpassed 3.5 billion pounds.

So, this factory here is where I work. That’s Alto Dairy. This is our milk receiving. Those are milk silos. And on the right was our vat room, okay? That factory was completed in 1983, just before I joined there. And at the time, like I said, it was the largest, newest, and most modern cheese factory in the United States. So, now I’m gonna switch gears to the Center for Dairy Research, where I work today. So, we are, I wanna say right up front, we are financially supported to a major degree by Wisconsin and U.S. dairy farmers, okay? They pay the bulk of the money that supports our salaries of our employees.

And that money comes via the dairy farmers through an organization in Wisconsin called Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, based in Madison. From the national farmers outside of Wisconsin, it comes from Dairy Management, Inc., which is based in the outskirts of Chicago, okay? So, here’s the sign right outside our building for the Center for Dairy Research. We’re in Babcock Hall, the ice cream place, right? We’re in the west side of that building. And just a nice picture of an old, old school, which is dear to my heart, dairy farm. Okay. What’s our purpose at the Center for Dairy Research?

“To turn knowledge and expertise “into the dairy industry’s success “by bridging cutting-edge research with practical education and outreach,” meaning outreach to processing plants, to cheese factories, to yogurt factories, to butter factories around the state. And again, our work is largely funded by dairy farmers. We work on behalf of dairy farmers to sell more of their product, their milk that’s made into dairy products, and hopefully sell it at a really high-quality dairy products that demand a really good price. And also to help exports of dairy products from Wisconsin around the world. Timeline for us. So, back in 1976, the University of Wisconsin established the Walter V.

Price– remember, he was the cheese guru from ’29 into the 1960s. 1929 into the 1960s. We established the Walter V. Price Cheese Research Institute. Ten years later, they changed the name to the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, which is what we are today. In 1994, we started a program with Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin called the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker Program. And today, we have 90 masters. What is that program? That’s a three-year educational program where people that have been licensed to make cheese for at least ten years can apply. Not everybody that applies gets admitted. And if they’re really good, they get admitted.

And they go through a number of short courses, inspections of their plant, evaluations of the cheese that they make for a three-year period. Then they have to take an exam. It’s a take-home exam. It typically takes 40 to 60 hours to complete. And if they pass that exam, which they don’t always do, they become a Wisconsin master cheesemaker. No other state has anything like it. There’s only two other similar programs in the world, I believe, one in Switzerland and one in France, to the best of my knowledge. So, these guys– and women, there are women in there, too. They are the best of the best cheesemakers. So, what do we do at the Center for Dairy Research?

Our biggest program is cheese, working with cheese. But we also work with ingredients, meaning the whey and the whey proteins from the cheese, cultured products, yogurt and things like that. Quality. How to maintain the highest-quality dairy products. Working with cheese and butter and yogurt factories around Wisconsin. And also the Master Cheesemaker program. We do most of that work. And then processing. The equipment that is used to make cheese, that’s used to make butter. We do research, okay? We do a lot of application. What’s application? That’s real practical stuff. How can we, y’know, improve this cheese or improve that yogurt or make a new style of cheese or something like that.

And then communication and education. We have a number of communication vehicles. One is called our <i>Dairy Pipeline.</i> It’s quarterly, winter, spring, summer, fall. It goes out to hundreds of cheese and butter makers and dairy people, dairy technologists, not just in Wisconsin, but around the U.S. and around the world. So, the cheesemakers themselves, okay? Pictured here on the left in the center, that’s Joe Widmer from Widmer’s Cheese in Theresa, Wisconsin. On the right is Marieke Penterman from Holland Family Farms, Marieke’s Cheese up in Thorp, Wisconsin. Okay? So, who do we work with? Well, this is just– this is not all.

I just put some of the logos of some of the cheese factories in Wisconsin that we work with. You may be familiar with some of those names at least. We work with cheesemakers big and small. I don’t care how small they are, how big they are, and everything in between, we work with them. But we also work with what we call end users, people that buy cheese. All the big pizza chains, McDonald’s, big retail stores, Whole Foods, Murray’s, Pick ‘n Save, Metcalfe’s. People that convert and package cheese, like Sargento, Boar’s Head. Work with all those type of people. Why?

To try and make sure they’re getting the cheese that they want, the quality that they want, and also to ultimately, to sell more cheese to help sell more Wisconsin milk and improve the economic conditions of Wisconsin dairy farmers. So, for a number of years, a number of years ago, I should say, somebody, I’m not sure who, did a, what should I say, some sort of calculation, economic calculation to see what the economic impact of dairy was in Wisconsin. And they concluded that dairy provided a 45.6 billion, with a B, dollars economic effect in Wisconsin. So, just for a frame of reference, if you think of Florida, you think of citrus. That’s a $7.2 billion economic impact.

If you think of Idaho, potatoes, $2.7 billion. $45.6 billion, that dwarfs that. Well, last fall, they redid this calculation, and now they conclude that it’s a $52.8 billion economic impact in Wisconsin. That is huge. That’s how important the dairy industry is to the economy of the state of Wisconsin. Now, I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about specialty cheese, which you’re gonna be able to sample here as soon as I get done talking to you guys. What is it? Well, limited production. It’s not mass produced. You pay really close attention to quality and natural flavors and textures, and typically, they demand a premium price in the industry.

It might be cow milk, that’s the dominant milk, but it could be goat, it could be sheep, or it could be mixed milk. We sometimes mix goat and sheep or goat and cow milk and make cheeses out of those. I’ll have you know that Wisconsin is the number one goat sheep producing– I’m sorry, goat cheese-producing state in the country as well. And we have a thriving sheep cheese industry as well. Since 1994, when we first started charting it, Wisconsin specialty cheese production has increased by more than 600%. It’s been a huge boost to our dairy industry, our cheese industry in this state. In the– if you look at the whole U.S., 48% of the specialty cheese made in the U.S. comes from Wisconsin, okay?

So again, Wisconsin is home to, what did I say before? Yeah, over 1,200 licensed cheesemakers making 600 different varieties, types, and styles of cheese. So, a lot of offerings. And we typically– Wisconsin, not we– Wisconsin cheesemakers dominate award winning in contests in North America in the United States, okay? Many, and I know cheese– I know most of the cheesemakers at most of the factories. We’re getting to the point now in history where we’re on the fourth generation. So, many of these cheese companies are family-owned, and they’re, the fourth generation is now taking over. Okay? So, imagine this, if you will. Just think for a second.

If Wisconsin were a country unto itself in the world, we would produce– we would rate in the fourth position. We would be the fourth-biggest country producing cheese, ahead of Italy, even. Only the rest of the U.S., Germany, and France would produce more cheese than Wisconsin, if Wisconsin were a country. So, again, back to specialty cheese. Unique story. Quality, craftsmanship. You know, the cheesemakers. These two are guys down there are longtime master cheesemakers and friends of mine. So, really skilled. Family values. Value the land. You see the nice picture of rolling farmland there? And camaraderie.

These master cheesemakers, yeah, they’re competitors, but they also help each other out too, when the need arises, okay? So, I mentioned the growth in specialty cheese. Here you can see from 1993 to 2018, 1993, only 4.1% of our cheese was specialty in Wisconsin. Now, 23.5, that’s in 2018. Now it’s right around 25% of the cheese made in Wisconsin is specialty. And like I said, Wisconsin makes 48% of all the specialty cheese in the United States. So what does CDR have to do with all this story of specialty cheese? Well, that’s been one of our dominant themes at the CDR is to try and support and grow the specialty cheese industry.

And cheese, the master cheesemakers who often are making these specialty cheeses have hit the big time. You can see this picture in the lower right. That’s this book. It’s got a few years on it now, so it’s not totally up to date, but it’s a book on the master cheesemakers of Wisconsin. It’s a really cool book. Okay. So now I want to talk specifically about a few cheese varieties, many of which you’ll be able to taste in a minute. Uplands Cheese, that’s a cheese company just north of Dodgeville in southwestern Wisconsin. And here you see a picture on the left. That’s Mike Gingrich, he’s the founder.

One the right, who’s now retired, on the right, Andy Hatch, the current owner and master cheesemaker there. They make a cheese called Pleasant Ridge Reserve. So there’s an interesting story. Mike Gingrich is an engineer, and he worked for a large– I won’t name the name– but a large, large electrical company out in California. And at some point, and I don’t know exactly the reason why, he decided he wanted to change careers and become a cheesemaker. So he moved to Wisconsin, he bought a farm, he came to the CDR. This was a few years before I came there. And he said, “I wanna make cheese. What type of cheese should I make?” And you know what we told him? “We can’t tell you that.

<i>”You</i> have to tell <i>us</i> what you want to make. “We’ll tell you, whatever you choose, how to make it. “But you have to figure out what’s the best cheese for you to make.” So he went to Europe and he traveled all around Europe, and he found a cheese in the French Alps called Beaufort. Beaufort is much like a Gruyre-style cheese, or a Comt-style cheese, or a Grand Cru-style cheese. He said, “This,” and he brought a piece back. “This is what I want.” So, working with Mike, we developed a recipe. He rented time at an existing cheese factory, and he started to make it. He entered his first contest in 2001… …and he won Best of Show.

That means there was probably, I’m guessing, well over a thousand different cheeses entered, and his was rated the best cheese in the whole of all those entered. It was the best of the best, okay? Well, his phone never stopped ringing, right? For cheese, so he spends– And then he ultimately built his own cheese plant where he makes this cheese. Well, actually, Andy Hatch makes that cheese today. He’s won four Best of Shows since 2000. No one else has ever done that, okay? So another interesting story. Seymour, a little bit west of Green Bay, there’s been a cheese factory there for many, many, many decades. It started as a Swiss cheese factory, and then it got converted to a provolone cheese factory.

And then that wasn’t going so well, so the company closed it and it sat vacant for quite a number of years. And then a cheesemaker with an investor support behind him decided to buy it. And so they bought it. And then they came down to us and said, “Hey, we bought this cheese– this old–” And I knew that factory because I had been in it before, so I was well aware of the facility. “Hey, we bought this factory and we wanna make blue cheese.” And we thought, actually, that was a good idea because that’s when blue cheese sales were really taking off. But the cheesemaker said, “But I have one minor problem.” “What’s your minor problem?” “Well, I really haven’t made a lot of blue cheese.

I’m not exactly sure how I should do it.” So we helped him develop recipes, and it took off. And it went from two employees to three employees to a dozen to two dozen to three dozen to, within five or six years, he had over 50 employees. And it was one of the biggest blue cheese factories in Wisconsin and in the country. And that blue cheese factory is still– It was subsequently sold because it was doing so well. And they could cash in, I suppose. I’m guessing that. And it’s still running today as a nice cheese factory. In a fairly small town like Seymour, it’s a, that’s a lot of pretty nice jobs in a town like Seymour. Okay, oops, sorry. Hoard, so I talked about Hoard’s, okay?

The Guernsey herds, there’s a Guernsey, okay? In the recent years working with us, they’ve decided to rather than ship their Guernsey milk to some cheese factory– I don’t know who– they wanted to make their own Hoard’s cheeses. I have one here tonight for you to taste. And so, they’ve rented time at various cheese factories to make their own line of Hoard’s cheeses. So it’s just a really cool story of W.D. Hoard and his ancestors continuing that tradition, continuing the magazine <i>Hoard’s Dairyman</i> , and now making their own branded cheese variety. Positioning for the future. I’m almost done, folks. So, Babcock Hall was completed in 1950.

It was the first building built on campus after World War II in Madison. Okay, well, there’s a dairy plant there. They made ice cream and stuff, and the CDR part is separate, separate organization from the dairy plant. But we shared the dairy plant floor, a little corner of it, right? And we outgrew that. And the dairy plant, you know, the water pipes, the electrical system, the heating, ventilation was all dating back to 1950. It was pretty much outdated.

So the industry came together, and to jumpstart the program, the industry raised, in nine months, they raised $18 million to jump-start this project of building a new CDR and then totally renovating the UW dairy plant, where they make the Babcock ice cream and things like that. And that’s a photo of it today. So this Babcock– The old Babcock Hall is here on the very far left side of this photo. The dairy plant, which got totally redone, the UW dairy plant where they make the ice cream and stuff, that’s this part right here in the middle. And this three– actually four-story structure, the fourth story is utilities. That’s the new Center for Dairy Research.

So this is to take us, you know, the old building and dairy plant lasted for 70 years. Hopefully this will take us, I don’t know if it’s 70, I can’t promise that, but well into the future. So wrapping this up, why did Wisconsin become so successful and become the dairy state in the U.S.? The soil was right, the climate was right, the rainfall was right. The immigrants that came here from Europe brought their talents in dairy herd management, cheesemaking, buttermaking, things like that. They formed partnerships between dairy farmers, the university cheesemakers, buttermakers, the university, the support industry, the equipment manufacturers grew.

The state supported research and regulations to improve food safety, cheese quality, and the total creativity of all these people working together resulted in our great Wisconsin dairy industry that we enjoy today. So I wanna leave you with this challenge– And we’re gonna taste cheese here in a minute– I hope you make some friends with cheese here tonight by tasting different cheese. But I also want you to make new friends, not just tonight, but when you go home and in future weeks by having different cheeses and offering people. It’s a great way to connect with people and form new friendships. So make friends with cheese. So with that, I’ll wrap up. Thanks for your kind listening tonight.

We thank Wisconsin dairy farmers and U.S. dairy farmers for their financial support. Without that, we wouldn’t exist in the format that we have today and the size that we have today at the Center for Dairy Research. We thank the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin organization, the Dairy Management, Inc., and the cheese industry and processors and yogurt industry, and butter industry, and all their support as well. But thank you very much.

[applause]